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Beyond Blossoms Gives Online Flower Shops a Facelift
by Josh Grossman

At Beyond Blossoms, a New England based flower company featuring European style fresh flower bouquets, business is blooming. With its newly redesigned website (http://www.beyondblossoms.com) the up-and-coming company is challenging larger competitors such as Proflowers and 1-800-Flowers to give customers a better online floral experience.

Before the launch, co-founders Josh Grossman and Gina Maschek researched how to differentiate their flower company from a sea of online competitors. Says Josh, “Basically, we visited the websites of our major competitors acting as regular customers to see what we liked and did not like about their sites.” The two created a long list of areas to improve on, including: offering fewer products and price points, offering more flower varieties such as lisianthus and cymbidium orchids, and creating a more elegant, minimalist interface. Gina comments, “If you look at one of our competitor’s sites for example, a search for roses will lead to 259 results displayed over 44 pages. Too much choice leads to a cluttered looking website and customer confusion. We purposely limited our entire product line to about 30 bouquets so customers can make a decision a lot quicker.” The website also allows users to search by flower color, earn rewards points for free flowers, get reminder emails (so you never miss another anniversary!), and specifies exactly how many stems are in each bouquet.

Josh, originally from New York, and Gina, originally from Germany, met while obtaining their MBA’s from Babson College in Wellesley, MA. The owners launched Beyond Blossoms after writing a business plan for an entrepreneurship class. “We were looking for a business that would allow us to be creative and sell something that people love. Flowers are the perfect item,” Josh states. In 2003, the company began servicing clients in the Boston Metro area before moving to New Hampshire in August 2004 after completing its first round of financing.

Beyond Blossoms buys its flowers straight from the grower to make sure they’re fresh. Using only 2-3 kinds of flowers in each bouquet, the company gives the arrangements a sophisticated look different from garden-style bouquets (which typically use a large mix of flowers and colors). A good example is the company’s Mediterranean Stroll Bouquet. It combines orange roses, purple trachelium, and lime green bupleurum. Each bouquet is hand-tied so recipients don’t need to do any arranging. Finally, the flowers are shipped by FedEx overnight in gift box so the recipient doesn’t have to be home for delivery.

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